Key Takeaways:
-
The queer community’s betrayal of Jewish members is not a fringe phenomenon: Eve Barlow documents that every major LGBTQ+ organization and community center in the Western world has been captured by an ideology that treats Jewish identity as incompatible with progressive belonging.
-
The red-green alliance between radical queer politics and jihadism is not driven by ignorance. This is an educated, ideologically trained movement, not a mob acting on instinct.
- LGBTQ+ Jews face a compounded vulnerability that straight Jewish allies rarely see: they are being targeted not only as Jews but within the intimate spaces where they sought refuge from a previous ostracization.
Pride began as a celebration of survival. The foundational belief was simple and radical: the closet is a form of violence. Hiding who you are does real damage. A generation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people built something extraordinary on that premise — legal rights, visibility, cultural legitimacy — and taught the world that no one should be forced to choose which part of themselves to suppress in order to be accepted.
That same movement is now asking Jews to leave their Star of David at the door.
Eve Barlow has been documenting this inversion from the inside. As a lesbian Jewish journalist who spent the first decade of her career at NME and writing cover stories for GQ, Elle, and The Guardian, she was woven into the fabric of progressive cultural life.
In 2019, she started saying one thing out loud: that the anti-Zionism rising around her was antisemitism in a new coat. The world that had welcomed her turned on her. She named her Substack after what followed: Blacklisted.
Thrown Out for Wearing a Star
In the week before this conversation, two married Jewish women, both American, one American-Israeli, walked into a queer women’s sauna night in Barcelona wearing Stars of David. What happened next was not spontaneous.
Barlow, who has spoken directly with the couple, believes the organizers were alerted in advance. The interrogation was initiated by a trans woman, a deliberate choice in Barlow’s reading: the trans identifier carries the highest position in the current oppression hierarchy, which offers maximum plausible deniability and minimum capacity for the targets to push back without being framed as the aggressor. The questions were calibrated: “We have no problem with the star. We have a problem with Zionists.” A second figure appeared, fluent in English, smugly explaining to two Jewish women that Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing.
The three perpetrators, once identified, were a trans biology teacher, a sociology doctorate at the University of Barcelona, and a queer lawyer who is also an author and parent.
“These are not people who bypass intelligence and swallow propaganda and just ignorantly start targeting Jews,” Barlow says. “These are people who are elitists, at the top institutions in these states. They are actively excluding Jews from public life and using Gaza and Palestine as the misnomer to do so.”
This was not an anomaly. Barlow has spent the past year researching and writing about the exclusion of Jews from LGBTQ+ spaces, and her conclusion is blunt: this pattern is endemic across every city with an organized LGBTQ+ presence. Every community center and organization has been targeted by a radical politics that has fused Palestinian advocacy with queer identity, not because of a genuine concern for Gazan rights but because the ideological framework demands it.
How Queer Theory Was Hijacked
Queer theory, Barlow argues, arrived in the 1970s as a Marxist reframe of homosexuality. Being queer was no longer primarily about same-sex attraction or civil liberties. It became a political identity organized around the binary of oppressor and oppressed, committed to dismantling any structure deemed colonial, including gender itself.
In that framework, Israel became a target not because of specific policies but because it reads as a colonial project. The alliance with Palestinian advocacy followed from the theory, not from any actual knowledge of or concern for life in Palestinian society, where gay people are persecuted.
The original movement, Barlow is careful to note, was centered around explicit goals: same-sex marriage, adoption rights, military inclusion, healthcare access, non-discrimination in employment. These were tangible legal reforms. The LGBTQ+ umbrella that exists today has largely replaced that agenda with what she calls an economy of feelings, focused on validation and political signaling rather than on defending the rights that were hard won, or protecting communities that are already seeing a legal backlash.
“The eyes of the LGBTQ+ community are completely off that ball,” she says, “because they’re invested in this kind of pie-in-the-sky idea of feelings and validation and political advocacy.”
The movement, in her telling, is now eating itself. Having been pushed so far toward ideological radicalism, it has begun to lose the rights it already secured. And no one inside is paying attention because their attention is elsewhere.
The Writing on the Wall
Barlow did not begin this fight because she is a theorist. She began speaking out because she was afraid.
She left London not only for a career change. She was living in Shoreditch, a racially diverse corner of East London, and she was watching the writing appear on the wall — literally — as she recalled walking past swastikas graffitied in the streets. A standout moment was when a Tesco grocery store near London Bridge quietly pulled kosher products from its shelves. When she approached staff, she was told they no longer carried Israeli settlement products. Meanwhile, the brand was manufactured in Kent, because staff had confused kosher with Israeli. BDS slogans were also appearing at morning editorial meetings, with colleagues inviting Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream to write a piece in favor of boycotts. Barlow, the only Jew in the office, was unable to get a word in edgewise.
“My gut was like, get the hell out of here,” she says.
She arrived in LA, threw herself into her career, and tried to leave it behind. Then George Floyd was killed, the BLM protests began, and synagogues in the Fairfax district were vandalized with the words “Fuck Israel” and “Fuck Jews.” She recognized the same political energy, in a different year, in a different city. She knew then it was far from over.
When she started speaking publicly about antisemitism in 2019, during Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign, the response was split down the middle. Half her world thought she had lost her mind. The other half expressed a secret, exhausted relief that someone they respected was finally saying it out loud. It was not without a cost.
“Every element of me, my lesbianism, my womanhood, all of that was up for discussing,” she says. “I never felt fear around talking about misogyny or being a lesbian. But I knew, when I started to speak about Jew hatred, how taboo and risky it was.”
The Double Betrayal
For lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans Jews, the current moment carries a particular weight. They are experiencing the antisemitism that all Jews are navigating while simultaneously being expelled from the spaces that once offered them shelter from a previous ostracization, because their sexuality made them unwelcome in the mainstream.
“It’s a double betrayal,” Barlow says, “and because it hits the most intimate part of our lives, it’s very trauma inducing.”
She is careful not to construct a hierarchy of victimhood. But she is direct about the specific vulnerability of LGBTQ+ Jews, who are exposed in spaces and on platforms that their straight Jewish allies do not see. She references the case in Australia, reported in the wake of the Bondi Beach murders, of young Jewish men being lured via Grindr and then filmed being beaten by their assailants. The digital world, in her account, has made the targeting of LGBTQ+ Jews both more precise and more invisible to those not living inside it.
The coordinated nature of the online hate she has experienced over years of advocacy is something she returns to. The attacks are not random individuals operating in isolation: they are campaigns. The people running them understand the internet’s architecture and use it deliberately. Until you have been the target, she says, you cannot fully comprehend what is possible.
You Can’t Reach Them
Barlow says flatly that you cannot reach the true believers. People like the Barcelona event organizers are in a “cult.” Barlow says they have organized themselves around a common target, and the social bonds that form through shared hatred are among the most durable humans produce.
The psychology she describes is one of inverted power. The pride movement was built around the memory of exclusion. That memory, weaponized rather than processed, becomes license to do the excluding, so the bullied becomes the bully. The closet, which was supposed to be abolished, gets rebuilt for the next group in line.
“They know exactly what they’re doing,” she says. “They feel entitled to enjoy it. In our lifetimes, we are going to be the ones in power. That’s the energy.”
The alliance between the radical queer left and radical Islamism, she argues, will not hold. They are united now by a common target and a shared desire for vengeance. One is the useful idiot of the other. When the common enemy is gone, the bigger bully takes out the smaller one. Barlow warns the LGBTQ+ world is not looking sideways at this, and by the time it does, it will be too late.
The Movement That Abandoned Its Own
The accusation of pink washing (the claim that Israel promotes its LGBTQ+ rights as a public relations exercise to distract from its treatment of Palestinians) is one Barlow dismisses with a kind of exhausted precision.
By the same logic, every Pride parade in every Western city is pink washing. The accusation is applied to one country: the Jewish state, which is in a region where LGBTQ+ rights are nonexistent. If celebrating queer freedom constitutes propaganda, it constitutes propaganda everywhere. Only Israel gets the charge because it is subject to the singular standard applied to the Jewish state.
Israel recognizes same-sex partnerships, has some of the most visible and celebrated Pride culture in the world, and sits in the geographic center of the most aggressively homophobic region on earth. That it has not yet legislated full same-sex marriage is a genuine gap. It is also a gap that Barlow believes will close, because Israel is a democracy and democracies evolve.
“At 78 years young,” she says, “and also fighting a war that hasn’t relented in those 78 years, I think we’re not doing that bad.”
A Message for the Queer Jewish Kid Told to Choose
Barlow’s piece in The Spectator, Queers for Zion, ends with the observation that the Free Palestine movement needs the gay movement far more than the gay movement needs it. The original moral core of Pride, extending freedom to those who have none, should point directly toward Gaza’s LGBTQ+ community, people living under Hamas rule without any of the rights that queer activists in the West take for granted.
An LGBTQ+ movement true to its founding logic would be advocating for gay Palestinians. Instead, it is acting, in her words, as a handmaiden for Hamas.
To any young queer Jewish person listening who has been told to choose, Barlow’s answer is short. Being openly Zionist and openly LGBTQ+ means targeting, harassment, and stalking. It is also the only path to genuine integrity, which she describes as a dying art form. The alternative is performing whatever identity the room requires you to be. That is the closet by another name.
“I don’t have a choice,” she says. “I never had a choice. Go forth. Be brave.”
Eve Barlow is a journalist, and author of Blacklisted, a Substack newsletter. This interview was conducted by Ben Chertoff for The Honest Take, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major streaming platforms [https://thehonesttake.transistor.fm/episodes/pride-and-prejudice-how-antisemitism-captured-lgbtq-spaces-with-eve-barlow].
Liked this article? Follow HonestReporting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to see even more posts and videos debunking news bias and smears, as well as other content explaining what’s really going on in Israel and the region. Get updates direct to your phone. Join our WhatsApp and Telegram channels!
